The Surrogate (19 page)

“Since you obviously just had a baby, I can sign this form as ‘certifier.’ If I had delivered the baby, I would be ‘attendee.’ But either way, it’s all legal and aboveboard.”

“Do I have to list the father’s name on the birth certificate?” Jamie asked.

Mae shook her head. “No. If you had a husband with you, I’d be required to report his name, but otherwise, I can just leave that line blank. Okay, now, what is your full name, dear?”

“Janet Marie Wisdom.”

Mae looked up. “There’re some Wisdoms over Goodwell way. You any relation to them?”

“Actually, I was born in Goodwell.”

“That so,” Mae said, studying Jamie’s face.

Jamie’s heart skipped a beat. She should have driven on to the next county before looking for a midwife. Or found a less common family name to borrow. Goodwell was too close to Guymon. Mae probably knew most of the families in this county.

“Okay,” Mae said, returning her attention to the form. “Mother’s birthplace—Texas County. Baby’s birthplace—Texas County.”

When she asked Jamie her date of birth, Jamie told her the date on the long-dead three-year-old’s tombstone.

Mae paused again, regarding Jamie over the top of her reading glasses for several heartbeats before returning her attention to the form. “So, what are you going to name the baby?” she asked.

“William Charles Wisdom.”

The midwife wrote down the name. “Okay, Janet, I’ll send this in the morning. You can get a copy of the official birth certificate from the state health department.”

Jamie asked to use the bathroom before leaving. When she returned, Mae had carried the baby into the living room and was copying down something from the Bible on the coffee table.

Loaded with booklets on infant care, useful addresses, foiled-wrapped slices of banana-nut bread, and a bottle of orange juice, Jamie asked the midwife how much she owed her. Mae shook her head. “I know what it’s like to be in an abusive relationship. You can pay me by taking good care of yourself and little William.”

“Billy,” Jamie said. “I named him for my father, and everyone always called him Billy.”

“Billy Wisdom. Now, that’s a right nice name.”

“I can never thank you enough,” Jamie said, her eyes misting over.

Mae opened her arms and Jamie stepped into them gladly. “I know, honey, it’s been rough,” Mae said soothingly, patting Jamie’s back. “But you have your health and a fine baby boy. And it would seem that you’ve taken the necessary precautions to keep the boyfriend from tracking you down.”

Mae handed Jamie some tissues. She blew her nose then bent to lift the baby from the infant carrier.

“No, you take that along with you,” Mae said. “I have a base for it that turns it into a car seat. I keep a lookout for used ones. And baby clothes. You’d be surprised how many mothers get caught unprepared.”

“I’ll send you money someday,” Jamie said. “I promise I will.”

“Never you mind,” Mae said. “You just take good care of yourself and little Billy.”

Mae put on her coat and carried the base out to the car. “Oh, your poor little dog,” she said when she saw Ralph. “You should have brought him inside.”

Ralph raced around the yard while Mae helped Jamie clear a place in the backseat and install the base for the infant seat. Once Billy Wisdom and his carrier were securely fastened in place, Jamie hugged Mae once again. “I’d all but forgotten that there were good people in the world,” she admitted.

“Lots of good people,” Mae said. Then she reached inside the pocket of her coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “My maiden name was Wisdom. I’ve written down the names, birth dates, and birthplaces of Janet Marie Wisdom’s parents. You’re going to need this information to get a copy of her birth certificate and apply for a Social Security number in her name.”

“I am…I am so sorry,” Jamie stammered. “I didn’t know what else to do. The baby’s father comes from a very rich family. I was afraid that…”

Mae held up her hand. “No need to explain, and you can rest assured that if anyone comes around here looking for you, they’ll get a blank stare from me. The good Lord is looking out for you, honey. He took you to little Janet’s grave then turned right around and directed your path to her great-aunt’s house. She was a sweet child and much loved. Use her name well.”

For a moment Jamie thought her knees were going to buckle. “I will,” she said. “I promise that I will.”

G
US LOOKED OUT
the window as the plane banked for a landing. The freshly cleared airstrip stood out starkly against the white landscape.

His kingdom was laid out below him, with Hartmann land as far as the eye could see—a sea of snow-covered land. He remembered Grandpa Buck saying that a man could never have too much land. The more land a man owned the more important he was.

He could see the little cemetery where his grandfather, father, and Sonny were buried. And Montgomery’s stillborn baby.

He’d always known that Montgomery worshipped his grandfather, but somehow it had never occurred to Gus that they might have been lovers. Poor Montgomery. How sad she must have been when her baby didn’t live. Had his grandfather also been sad? Or just relieved?

Kelly met the plane.

“More bad news,” she announced as she pulled away from the airstrip. “Jamie Long had the baby.”

Kelly drove him to what once had been the McGraf farm. Gus went in and looked around. At the blood-soaked mattress. The thick pile of ashes in the fireplace. Trash left by previous visitors. No fresh trash, though. Jamie had cleaned up after herself and taken it with her.

He pointed at the mutilated second mattress. “What’s the story on that?”

“Probably she used the stuffing for kindling.”

He noticed something shiny sticking out from beneath the bloody mattress and bent to pick it up. It was a small pair of scissors. Not nail scissors. Larger than that and of better quality. He carried them over to the window. They were engraved with vines and flowers.

“She probably used those to cut the cord,” Kelly said.

Yes, she would have had to do that, Gus realized. It was hard to imagine a woman being alone at such a time—a young woman who’d never given birth before. And with all that blood. She must have been very frightened.

What had made Jamie Long leave the ranch, Gus pondered. What things had she deduced on her own, and what things had his mother told her? Surely the girl realized that Mary Millicent was as crazy as a loon. But not always. Sometimes she understood exactly what was going on. Sometimes she played them for fools. Gus knew that she could walk. When the Mexican gardener had carried her down the stairs to Sonny’s room, he noticed that the bottoms of her house shoes were scuffed.

“I remembered one of my men saying that he’d pointed out the McGraf farm to her,” Kelly said. “I drove up this morning to take a look.”

Gus wanted to be angry. Wanted to yell at Kelly and tell her she should have looked here first. But this wasn’t the only deserted farmhouse on the ranch. He’d paid the back taxes on at least a half dozen of these small spreads and had the occupants evicted. He didn’t like the property of no-count dirt farmers backing up to Hartmann land. Didn’t like their animals wandering onto Hartmann land. Didn’t like them using the ranch store and service station and thinking they should be allowed to attend the Hartmann City church. Didn’t like them tapping into the same aquifer with their wells. Didn’t like them observing the comings and goings at the ranch.

The McGrafs. That was the family who’d frozen to death after the sheriff evicted them. But what did people expect? That they could stay on indefinitely without paying their taxes? It wasn’t his fault that dumb-ass McGraf decided to leave in the middle of winter without first checking the weather report. Even if his generator was broken, everyone should have a battery-operated radio for emergencies. Or he could have listened to the radio in his truck—if it had a radio. Surely the man could have gotten the weather report somehow. He could have asked the sheriff for another day or two or taken shelter with a neighbor. There was no excuse for putting his family in danger like that.

Or maybe it had been like this most recent storm. Kelly said it hadn’t been predicted to come this far north. Somehow Gus knew that Jamie Long had listened to the weather report before she left—for all the good it did her.

Gus walked through the house. Faded wallpaper was peeling from the walls, and tattered remnants of curtains hung from some of the windows. Mrs. McGraf had tried to make the place pretty.

He needed to stop thinking about the McGrafs, though, and focus on Jamie Long. Judging from the pile of ash in the fireplace, she had gathered a lot of wood and been here for a significant period of time. Right under Kelly’s nose. Once again he was all but overcome by the urge to blame Kelly. To berate her.

But he didn’t want Kelly going crazy like Montgomery. He needed Kelly to keep things going at the ranch now that Montgomery was gone.

He walked into the larger of the two bedrooms. Had Mr. and Mrs. McGraf been happy in this room, he wondered.

And he wondered how tall a man Mr. McGraf had been.

With all his riches and power, Gus had never experienced true love and joy with a woman. But he had experienced something just as precious when he was with Sonny. A pure, unselfish love that went all the way to bedrock.

He hadn’t kidded himself into thinking that he was going to love Jamie Long’s baby with anything close to what he had felt for Sonny. Every time he saw the baby, he would think of what he’d had to do to the kid’s mother. But he wanted his sister to have Sonny’s baby to love and raise and to pass off as her own if that was what she wanted. And human nature being what it was, Jamie Long would not have been able to resist blackmailing Amanda or selling her story to the highest bidder.

The closest thing to joy he was going to have for the rest of his days was making Amanda happy. If there was a hell, he already was going to burn in it. One more major sin wasn’t going to make it any worse. What he had to do now was figure out how to find Jamie Long and Sonny’s baby.

“We checked all the hospitals within a hundred-mile radius,” Kelly told him. “And I swore out a warrant with the county sheriff accusing her of stealing money and jewelry.”

“Call the sheriff and tell him that you were mistaken,” Gus said. “I will handle the search—
privately.
As far as anyone on this ranch or in this county is concerned, she left and was never heard from again.”

What he needed to do now was crawl inside the girl’s head. What were her needs?

Gus took one more look around the pitiful little dwelling, then walked out onto the porch and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. The message on the tiny screen informed him that service was not available. Which irritated him. Even if the population density in Marshall County wasn’t significantly higher than that of the moon, it was ridiculous not to have reliable cell-phone service.

He motioned to Kelly and headed for her vehicle.

After she dropped him off at the ranch house, he went straight to his bedroom, where the phone line was secure.

A man’s voice answered.

“I’m at the ranch,” Gus said. “I need you to come right away.”

“Is this official or unofficial business?”

“Unofficial,” Gus said.

Then he sat staring at nothing.

Montgomery.
It was hard to believe that she was really dead. She had always been there for him.
Always.
He shouldn’t have yelled at her. He’d been yelling a lot lately. The pompous, swaggering ignoramus they’d put in the White House thought that he should actually be in charge. If Gus hadn’t been so aggravated with him, he wouldn’t have lost his temper with Montgomery.

Gus did not allow himself to peer over the edge of the open casket as he lit the candles placed around it. With the flickering candlelight penetrating the shadows in the vaulted hall, he brought the stepping stool from the library. Without it, he would not be tall enough to kiss Montgomery’s cold dead lips. And he needed to do that. Not for Montgomery, but for himself. Maybe such an act would make him feel better.

She looked ghastly.

He touched her cheek. It felt like cold rubber.

He sucked in his breath and bent forward to plant a kiss on her lips. “I am so sorry,” he whispered.

Now the only person in the whole world who loved him was his sister.

He had waited until right before he left for the ranch to tell Amanda. She was still in bed, a coffee cup in her hands. Gus told Toby he needed to talk to his sister alone.

Amanda took one look at Gus’s face and put the cup on the bedside table. “What is it?” she asked, patting a place on the bed beside her. The bed was low enough that he was able to seat himself next to her with some degree of dignity. He took her hand in his and kissed it.

He didn’t believe in euphemisms. People did not “pass away” or “depart this earth.” But he could not bring himself to say the
d
word. He took his beloved sister in his arms and whispered to her, “We’ve lost Montgomery.”

Amanda gasped and pulled away, her eyes wide as she stared into his face. “She’s not…”

Gus nodded.

Amanda screamed and began pulling at her hair and clawing her cheeks, leaving angry red marks. Toby came rushing back into the room. “Get the hell out of here,” Gus yelled, grabbing his sister’s hands. He couldn’t stand to see her like this. “No, my darling, please don’t do that to your beautiful face. We still have each other. We will always have each other.”

Finally she calmed herself enough to ask how Montgomery had died. Gus considered lying to her but decided that she would discover the truth sooner or later and said, “She went out to the cemetery in the middle of a snowstorm wearing only her nightgown. They found her next to that little tombstone where a stillborn baby is buried. I think the baby must have been hers and Grandpa Buck’s.”

That had set her off again, with anger creeping into her tirade. How could Montgomery do such a thing at a time like this? “I need her to help me with the baby,” she wailed.

Gus didn’t have the heart to tell her that Jamie Long had disappeared. He would let her digest Montgomery’s death first.

At first Amanda insisted that she was coming with him to the ranch so they could bury Montgomery together. But he reminded her that she supposedly was in the final weeks of her confinement for what had been billed as a difficult pregnancy and it would seem irresponsible if she did such a thing. “But it’s
Montgomery,
” she wailed.

Before he left Victory Hill, Gus had informed Toby that he was under no circumstances to allow Amanda to come to Texas and that he would find himself divorced, penniless, and minus some body parts if he did.

Gus took one final look at Montgomery’s lifeless face, then climbed down from the stool, sat down on it, and buried his face in his hands.

“I am so sorry,” he said again. “So very sorry.”

The crying was less satisfying than he wanted it to be and it was chilly in here, so he blew out the candles then climbed the stairs and headed for the tower door.

He wanted his mother to put her arms around him even if he had to beg her.

After leaving the midwife’s house, Jamie drove to the local Wal-Mart and, with Billy in the carrier and the carrier in a shopping cart, hurried her way through the store, trying to remember all the items on her mental shopping list. She selected assorted articles of baby clothing and a couple of packages of receiving blankets and wash cloths. Then she spotted a cloth sling designed to carry a baby across an adult’s tummy and tossed it into the cart. She found a knitted cap for herself, selected a couple of nursing bras, then headed to pharmaceuticals for the bottle of rubbing alcohol and cotton balls she needed to clean the baby’s cord stump. Next she located the hair dye and selected a shade called “burnished chestnut.” Last she selected a pair of scissors suitable for cutting hair. Her long blond hair and height were the two most noticeable things about her appearance. She couldn’t do anything about her height, but as soon as she had a chance, she would do something about her hair. In the meantime, the cap would have to do.

Once she had loaded the baby and her purchases into the car, she stuffed her hair inside the cap then drove into downtown Guymon and turned into the ATM lane at the Bank of the Panhandle. She inserted the ATM card that she had never used and was relieved when the machine accepted her PIN number. Her money was still in an account at the Austin bank. Almost $2,000 remained of the original $10,000 advance and, with no job and a baby to care for, she was going to need every penny of it.

The ATM machine allowed her to withdraw only $250. She then drove to City Bank, where she was allowed $500.

Next she drove around looking for the library.

Only a few cars were parked in the library lot. Jamie unfastened the infant carrier from its base, carried her sleeping baby inside, and headed straight for the computers.

First she looked for classic-car dealers. As much as she hated to part with it, she feared that Gus Hartmann already had people searching for her car. She surfed around a bit and found one site full of friendly advice for selling worthy older cars and a warning against randomly driving onto just any secondhand car lot. That said, the site recommended a number of reputable classic-car dealers.

The baby was waving his arms. Jamie calmed him by rocking the carrier with her foot.

Next she searched for Joseph Brammer’s telephone number and found a listing in the Austin white pages. With a pounding heart, she used a pay phone in the foyer to place a call but got a recording informing her that the number was no longer in service.

Back at the computer she tried the business listings in Austin. Then she Googled his name but found too many matches to deal with. Next she tried to locate a listing for attorney Joseph Brammer in numerous Texas cities then finally gave up. There was no telling where he had opened his law practice, she realized.

She knew that his grandparents had moved to a retirement community in Georgia, but she couldn’t remember the name of the town. Hopefully, though, she could find a listing for his parents in Houston. She had met his parents on several occasions but either had never known or had forgotten his father’s first name.

There were dozens of Brammers in Houston, but one listing jumped out at her. “Arthur S. Brammer.” Joe’s middle name was Arthur, and she was certain that Joe’s grandmother had referred to her son-in-law as Art.